SVU: The Night Bird

I’m all about the right read for the right time, and October begs a good, spooky, mystery. The Night Bird was just that. It read like a double episode of Law & Order SVU: the brooding investigator with a haunted past and a strong female professional being victimized by a series of targeted killings of young, innocent women.

The premise is that the “Night Bird” killer is kidnapping, hypnotizing, and conditioning women into reliving their forgotten phobias when they hear Joni Mitchell’s “The Night Bird.” And he’s doing this to women who at some point have been patients of Dr. Francesca Stein; a psychiatrist who specializes in hypno-therapies to rid people of debilitating phobias.

It was pretty easy to see some of the connections early on (phobias, hypnosis, the Joni Mitchell song), and SPOILER I also saw it coming that Frankie’s husband was cheating on her with her sister and that the death of Frankie’s father was less than innocent. But this made me think the larger mystery would also be easy to solve, and then I would have thought the book was pretty uninteresting. But I was wrong.

I could tell who the “Night Bird” was NOT, but I never guessed who it was, which made me like the book even more! It bums me out when I’m able to figure out the end. And I liked the twist with Frankie’s sister, I didn’t really see that coming. Overall, I thought it was a good mystery. But I will say, I think the characters were a little loose, not enough meat. Or maybe just not relatable enough for me? Also, I expected there to be something to tie in Frost’s sister’s murder. But I guess that’s just a character backstory to last Freeman through more books in the detective Easton series (which was in fact confirmed by the author in a comment on one of our Instagram posts). All-in-all I’d say this was definitely a great October read!